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Geography reference

Local Authority Districts

The council that actually decides things — planning, licensing, waste, local plans — and the level most UK policy data is published at. Coarser than an LSOA and far more likely to be the unit a client asks about by name.

361
LADs in 2024
677 km²
average size
2.90 km²
smallest
26,156 km²
largest

The 22 LADs of Wales, drawn from the exact boundaries Vizzie joins your data to — not a picture of them.

How the codes are built

A nine-character GSS code whose first three characters say what kind of authority it is: E06 unitary authorities (63 of them), E07 non-metropolitan districts (164), E08 metropolitan boroughs (36), E09 London boroughs (33), W06 Welsh principal areas (22), S12 Scottish council areas (32) and N09 Northern Irish districts (11).

Names are not keys. There are councils that share a name with the county around them, and "Newcastle" alone will not tell you whether you mean Tyne or Lyme. Join on the code.

E07000208Epsom and Ewell
E08000017Doncaster
E07000199Tamworth
E07000213Spelthorne

What it rolls up into

  1. Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) — about 1,500 people
  2. Middle Layer Super Output Area (MSOA) — about 7,200 people
  3. Local Authority District (LAD)
  4. Region, then country

Which years exist

This is the least stable geography here, because local government keeps being reorganised. April 2023 alone replaced the districts of North Yorkshire, Somerset and Cumbria with unitaries, retiring their codes. ONS issues a new set most years and the changed areas get new codes rather than amended ones, which is deliberate: a code always means one shape.

Vizzie holds the 2024 set. Older datasets will match everywhere except the places that reorganised, and those are usually the ones worth asking about.

Map a spreadsheet of these

Paste a column of LAD codes into Vizzie with whatever you measured beside it. Vizzie recognises the code format, joins it to the boundaries above and draws the map — no shapefile, no download, no GIS install.

Open Vizzie

Boundaries: Office for National Statistics (2024) — Local Authority Districts (Open Government Licence v3.0). Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024.
Licence: OGL-3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics. Boundary counts and sizes measured from the data Vizzie holds, 2026-09-19.